Still Here

 

A year since my last post here but that does not mean I have forgotten.  I stop by from time to time and this still remains the most comprehensive documentation of what I have been up to.  I thought other social media would take over but the shine has definetly gone from those sites. The traffic is down and the agression is up so I have been on there less and less.  I have set up my own website and that is what I have spent the most energy on maintaining.  If you are in your art journey and dont have your own website I would urge you to set one up.  As you can see social media trends wax and wane and change ownership and terms.  Your site will remain within your control and be a fixed point for all your work.  

A trend with a massive impact in the last year has been AI.  If this was 10 years ago I would for sure be rethinking my career plans and thinking about what to specialise in.  There is no doubht jobs are been lost in concept art, stock art, marketing art and I see jobs requiring artists include ai in their workflow.  I have all but stopped creating illustrations for commissions.  I imagine only the top tier big names will survive in those fields.  I still enjoy drawing and painting but create for myself. These are some 2 hour studies from photos  created as part of studybuddies. 

 

For now the more specialist, bespoke art still requires an artist.  I have focused on continuing with 3D with some animation. 

I even recorded some starter Blender tutorials.  Something I plan to add to but maybe in shorter form. 

The other strand of work is graphic design for technical folk. 

It is still a struggle to get by.  The cost of living increases are hard to battle against. Despite all that I am still here and still producing work.  I recomend checking in on my website to see all my work https://dertypaws.com/

I have lots more to post so I will come back and continue to add to this. In the meantime if you have any questions drop them in the comments and I will answer if I can.  

3D model of an ebike

 

Its been a while.  

I have been working and practicing.  The latest personal project was modelling this ebike.  I wanted to do a more complicated modelling challenge and this one certainly delivered.  

It took quite a while and I eventually had to decide on an end point so did not quite get to the level of finish I had thought I would but it was diminishing returns as I modelled smaller and smaller parts.  

I used geonodes to make the chain but had to apply it to animate the chain. Could not figure out a way to animate it otherwise.  The chain was on a curve constraint. 

To animate the bike I used the rigacar addon but only applied it to the two wheels. 

I used drivers for the cranks and pedals 

After working so hard on the model I wanted to work with it and took a few different approaches for animation.  One was a 2D /3D mixture. I painted grass and sunflowers on different layers and then animated the growth cycle in Blender importing the .[ng s as image layers.  The animation was edited in DaVinci Resolve.  

    I have had an Adobe cloud subscription for the past few years and have always felt I was fighting the software- the constant fidely updates and crashes meant I had pretty much done all my Photoshop work in CS6 of late.  As for Premier Pro I just never got comfortable with the work flow.  So rather that paying upwards of €750 this year I bought DaVinci and the Steam version of Substance Painter and still had change leftover.  So far I am impressed with DaVinci. 

The other animation was on a stage in Blender where I animated the rig and played alot with lighting. 

The final animation

A breakdown of the animation

You can see better quality on my website here https://dertypaws.com/archives/portfolio/e-bike-3d-model-animation/

Latest Showreel

 

Put together a reel of my most recent 3D work.  This was all done in Blender and has client work and some personal work.  The personal projects are explorations of various Blender systems and of late has been alot of geometry nodes stuff. It looks like the mechanics for geo nodes have been settled on and is now worth spending time to explore and learn.  

I have been creating 2D work as well mostly technical illustrations and have played around with using 3D to help with that.  The weakest part of that workflow is relying on freestyle export to obtain vector graphics. 

I hve though about creating  some videos to show how some of this work was created.  If there is some shot that you are curious about let me know and I will try and answer. 

Snowy Cone

Click to open video on Vimeo

 

Had an opportunity to try out the revamped Geometry nodes in Blender 3.0.  I had done pieces of work with them during the year but the final version took a different approach and seems more intuitive.  This means that making more complex systems is a little easier.  

The other thing I wanted to push in this work was the lighting.  

The cone was built on a bezier curve with curves instanced on points along it.  Kernals were then arrayed along the curves. 

This meant that size, density and array angles could be modified.  In the animation everything was driven by frame number.  

The holly was built off of 2 leaf arrangements.  Growth was on a circle and was controlled by an empty. 

Stars were an icosphere with voronoi texture added.  Everything was inside it and then inside a volumetric cube. 

I rendered in Eevee so took advantage of a more stylised but atmospheric look.  

Edited in Premier Pro because I paid a whopping amount for the priviledge of accessing their software for another year so tried out some effects including some lens flare using assets made in Blender.  

Added the premade cones. 

Text was created in Blender converted to mesh and added an explosion and ran it backwards.   

Music was form a site called  https://freemusicarchive.org/  Lightblow - Sunlight under CC 4.0.

And that was it.  Took a while to make as I fumbled learning alot of new stuff but got there.

Put any questions you have in the comments.  

Landing on Planet

 

                                                                      Landing on Planet

Hello and welcome to what became the most challenging piece of Blender work I have created so far.  

This was a commission and that is what stretched me as I could not give up when things got challenging. If I had known how big this project would get I would have probably passed.  The reward was all the new stuff I learned along the way.  I wanted to do it as I knew it would push me out of all the lowpoly work I have done and towards realisim.  The other big draw was   ... its space. 

It started off with a storyboard.

Then a landscape which I ended up modeling as I needed some specific features.  It had to be not identifyable as Moon or Mars. 

Planet Landscape

For the planet scene I used the resource made available by NASA  https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4720.  Changed up the colour a little. 

Moon Shot

Next were the vehicles of which there ended up being 3.  

The lander had to have a few moving parts and I would have done a proper rig on it in hindsight but it ended up being  wheels parented and a driver on each wheel.  

Lander rigging

The next vehicle was the cleanup vehicle.  This had to have a few specific features so I made it to order.  On this one I did rig the wheels as the vehicle had to move in circles.  I used rigacar to rig all 6 wheels. http://digicreatures.net/articles/rigacar.html .  This is a fantastic addon with great instructions.  I had not used it before but it was great and easy to animate using a follow path modifier.   The big disappointment on this vehicle was the laser.  I wanted to use a different approach to render but rendering time was limited so I went with a basic solution.  

Clean up Vehicle

The final vehicle was the spaceship which was deliberately non descript.  It was a simple design.  The dificulty on it was adding  the smoke and heat.  This all ended up being parented.

Space ship landing

Thats a summary of the major assets.  

I will go through some of the more complex effects in the next installment.  If there is something in particular you would like to know more about drop a note on Twitter. I am planning on creating some YouTube videos to go in more depth on those.   

99 Ice-cream a Journey

 

99 Ice-cream a Journey

https://vimeo.com/581118123

As i was working on some client work I had to come up with some effects.  Its always better to stick with tried and true methods when doing client work but I have found doing 3D work means you almost always end up overcoming challenges (problem solving) on the job.  The down side is that there is limited time to explore. That was where this project evolved from.  I took some elements and pushed them and created this short.  

It was all created in Blender and used the ocean modifier and the explode modifier. I added the heat shimmer as a post effect in Premier Pro.  

I have realised to be efficient doing these is to choose what needs to be done in 3D and what can be added in post.

As rendering has serious time and environment cost I have thought more about it and want to explore utilising Unreal Engine to capture these kinds of animations.  

Unreal are holding a course over the next few weeks as an introduction to its uses in animation and I am enrolled to see what is possible. 

After the first week I can see the possibilities but there is a steep learning curve.  

Stay tuned. ...

Showreel

 

showreel  

Think this is the longest break in posting since I started this blog. 

I have been busy with NDA work so no personal work to share.  I have a bit of a break now so I took some time to put together a showreel.  I did not have much animation prior to this but more of the  work I have been taking on is motion based.   There is an increasing demand for it with Instagram and Tik Tok been the most dominant sharing platforms and peoples expectations for more production.  

Despite all that my freelance took a big hit last year and though things have picked up this year it is still a struggle.  

I am at a decision point as to what to do next.  I hope to produce more personal work for the next few weeks and figure out the future - or the little bit I can control.